Happier than ever, Gary Oldman isn't ready to quit 'Slow Horses' anytime soon

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Two years ago, Gary Oldman found himself in Yorkshire for the wedding of his oldest son, Alfie.As Oldman’s other sons, Gulliver and Charlie, were there too, along with his wife, Gisele Schmidt, and his stepson, William, Oldman thought it’d be a lark to make the hourlong drive through the countryside to the York Theatre Royal, where he began his acting career in 1979.

The boys were intrigued, as they had heard stories over the years.Before Oldman burst on the film scene in the 1980s playing punk rocker Sid Vicious in “Sid & Nancy” and British playwright Joe Orton in Stephen Frears’ “Prick Up Your Ears,” he had turned heads in a run of plays throughout England.

Then he was, as he puts it, “kidnapped by cinema.” Wanting to see their father’s career origin story, the family piled into a couple of cars and headed out.“It was a lovely kind of homecoming, a debt paid, really,” Oldman tells me in a Zoom conversation from London.We’ve talked a great many times over the years, and while I wouldn’t call him nostalgic, Oldman most definitely is a sentimental man, especially when it comes to family.

That day, walking around the York Theatre Royal, thinking he needed to pinch himself because, really, how could it be 45 years since he first took that stage (“It all feels last week,” he thought), Oldman met Paul Crewes, the theater’s chief executive.“Do you think you might want to ever return to the stage,” Crewes asked Oldman, “and if so, where might that be?” Oldman thought for a moment and replied: “I think I’m standing on it.” Sure enough, last year, in between filming seasons of his acclaimed Apple TV spy series “Slow Horses,” Oldman starred in Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” playing a 69-year-old man who sits alone and listens to the recorded memories of his younger self.

Everyone was so happy with it that Oldman was a...